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Going, going, gone! Mobile Data Flies Out Of Ballparks This Season

As it turns out, fans enjoyed sharing these magic moments from the diamond a little more this time of year as well.

This month, hundreds of thousands of fans headed to ballparks to be part of the playoff action. And in doing so, they shared their favorite plays and post-game celebrations with friends and family via their mobile devices.

At many of these ballparks we have installed specialty in-stadium networks, called Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). These DAS support the additional mobile data demand we see when tens of thousands of people try to share a big hit at the plate, or a saving catch at the wall, all at once.

Here are some of the interesting data traffic stats from this year’s playoffs:

We had five venues with cellular DAS coverage, and a total of 18 playoff games were hosted at these stadiums. The average cellular data usage on our network for each of these games was 352GB.

352GB of data is an increase of 86% compared to the average data usage per game at the final home series of the regular season across all five venues.

Out of these 18 games, the highest single game total for cellular data usage on a DAS was at Busch Stadium in St. Louis during the league championship series October 11, when more than 508GB of data crossed the network. The highest peak hour of cellular data usage on a DAS also occurred October 11 at Busch Stadium when more than 84GB of data crossed the network from 8-9pm CT.

We set all-time records for mobile data traffic usage at AT&T Park, where we have two complementary networks– DAS and Wi-Fi.

During the final round of the playoffs, fans used the most data during Game 4 played on October 25 at AT&T Park, consuming approximately 2.1TB of data across both our cellular DAS and Wi-Fi networks (more than 477GB of data on DAS and more than 1,626GB on Wi-Fi). This is equivalent to more than a whopping 6M social media posts with photos.

However, perhaps the most telling statistic is that Wi-Fi usage during the final round of this year’s playoffs at AT&T Park increased approximately 302% compared to the average game during the final round of the 2012 playoffs.

These numbers show more than just baseballs were flying out of ballparks this postseason. With fans continuing to join in the shared experience from sports venues more every year, we expect to see more big mobile numbers from championship moments in seasons to come.